A Fetish for Purity Adelaide Chen 12th Grade

Human history is rife with episodes of mass purgings, genocides, and tyrannies, driven by an ideal for purity that transcends all else. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, a dystopian society re-establishes itself in the wake of a radioactive fallout by relocating people with desirable traits to the safer haven of Mars, abandoning the less desirable people to face the hostilities of a ravaged and poisoned Earth. Society’s fetish for purity manifests itself in a contradictory social structure that aims to discriminate against the minorities, revealing humanity’s desire for superiority.

By filtering candidates for emigration based on intelligence, society practices eugenics to keep specials from contaminating the purity of the human gene pool. From the outset of the novel, humans are divided into two distinct categories: regular and special. People who do not meet the social standards for reproduction or intelligence are labeled “specials” and cannot emigrate or marry. Most regulars, in contrast, have already emigrated to Mars, because “loitering on Earth potentially meant finding oneself abruptly classed as biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. Once pegged as special, a...